Huawei Kirin 980 CPU to Outperform Apple A12 Bionic Says Huawei

Huawei has reacted to the launch of Apple’s A12 Bionic chip, assuring fans that the Kirin 980, powering the upcoming Huawei Mate 20 Series will outperform Apple’s 12 Bionic. Apple had recently announced the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and the iPhone XR, all of which came taunting Apple’s latest A12 Bionic chip.

Pairing the A12 Chip with the company’s in-house processor, Huawei issued a statement, claiming that the Kirin 980 CPU will perform better than the A12 Bionic on Apple XS-series.

More About Apple A12 Bionic Processor

The A12 features an Apple-designed 64-bit ARMv8.3-A six-core CPU, with two high-performance cores running at 2.49 GHz called Vortex and four energy-efficient cores called Tempest. The A12 also integrates an Apple-designed four-core graphics processing unit (GPU) with 50% faster graphics performance than the A11. The A12 includes dedicated neural network hardware that Apple calls a “Next-generation Neural Engine”. This neural network hardware has eight cores and can perform up to 5 trillion operations per second.

The A12 (also called the T8020) is manufactured by TSMC, using a 7nm FinFET process, and it contains 6.9 billion transistors. The die size of the A12 is 83.27 mm2, 5% smaller than the A11. It is manufactured in a package on package (PoP) together with 4 GB of LPDDR4X memory in the iPhone XS and XS Max and 3 GB of LPDDR4X memory in the iPhone XR.

More About Huawei Kirin 980 CPU

The Kirin 980 will debut with Huawei Mate 20 series phone whose launch is set for October 16th. However, during product brief, Huawei mentioned that it is confident its processor would outperform Apple’s A12 Bionic chipset. Huawei has been working on the Kirin 980 for over three years and it primarily focused on Power and Efficiency, Intelligence, and, Connectivity.

The Kirin 980 features 6.9 billion transistors within a 1cm2 die size, up by 1.6 times from the previous generation and is also exactly the same number Apple has managed to pack on the A12 Bionic. The company claims that the Kirin 980 is 75% faster than its previous generation as far as the CPU is concerned and 46% faster when it comes to the GPU.

Kirin 980 is an Octa-Core SoC with two ARM Cortex A76 cores clocked up to 2.6GHz for Turbo performance, two ARM Cortex A76 cores clocked up to 1.92GHz for Long-lasting performance and four ARM Cortex A55 cores clocked up to 1.8 GHz for power efficiency. It has support for LTE Cat.21 offering download speeds of up to 1.4 Gbps. It is also including a real-time video processing ass well as the capability of recognizing 4,500 images per minute.

It also supports common AI frameworks such as Caffee, Tensorflow and Tensorflow Lite, and provides a suite of tools that simplifies the difficulty of engineering On-Device AI, allowing developers to easily tap into the leading processing power of the Dual NPU. As for connectivity, it comes with integrated Multi-mode 4G LTE Modem – Category 21 FDD / TDD for downloads (up to 1.4 Gbps), 4 x 4 MIMO, 5CC CA, 256QAM; 200 Mbps downloads, 2×2 MIMO, 1x20MHz CA, 256-QAM and is also 5G ready with Balong 5000 Modem.

If the claims are to be believed, then the battle between Apple’s A12 Bionic and the Huawei Kirin 980 will be legendary. But we’ll just wait to see how well the Kirin 980 will fare against A12 Bionic in real world, so stay for the launch of Huawei Mate 20 on October 16.